1. Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to a system and method to route work requests in an enterprise, and particularly to a system and method for routing a work request initially to a sufficiently suitable resource, while concurrently searching for a more suitable resource for later routing the work request.
2. Description of Related Art
Contact centers are employed by many enterprises to service inbound and outbound contacts from customers. A primary objective of the contact center management is to ultimately maximize contact center performance and profitability. An ongoing challenge in contact center administration is monitoring and optimizing contact center efficiency in usage of its available resources. The contact center efficiency is generally measured by metrics such as service level agreement (SLA) and match rate. Contact center resources include the agents, the communication assets (e.g., number of voice trunks, number and bandwidth of video trunks, etc.), the computing resources (e.g., speeds, queue lengths, storage space) and so forth.
Service level is one measurement of the contact center efficiency. Service level is typically determined by dividing the number of contacts accepted within the specified period by the number accepted plus the number that were not accepted, but completed in some other way (e.g., abandoned, given busy, canceled, flowed out etc.). Service level definitions may vary from one enterprise to another.
Match rate is another indicator used in measuring the contact center efficiency. Match rate is usually determined by dividing the number of contacts accepted by a primary skill level agent within a period of time by the number of contacts accepted by any agent for a queue over the same period. An agent with a primary skill level is one that typically can handle contacts of a certain nature more effectively and/or efficiently compared to an agent of lesser skill level. There are other contact center agents that may not be as proficient as the primary skill level agent, and those agents are identified either as secondary skill level agents or backup skill level agents. As can be appreciated, contacts received by a primary skill level agent are typically handled more quickly and accurately or effectively (e.g., higher revenue attained) than a contact received by a secondary or even backup skill level agent. Thus, it is an objective of most contact centers to optimize match rate along with service level.
For example, if in a contact center there are five resources capable of handling voice calls and five resources capable of handling video calls, and number of received work request of voice calls in the contact center is two, and number of work requests for video chats is ten, then the agents handling the video chats are overloaded with the received work requests while the agents handling the voice calls are in an idle state. Therefore, the conventional routing techniques may route some of the video call requests to resources that can only handle voice calls to meet service level constraints, which may annoy the customers requesting for video chats. Hence, the conventional routing techniques are inflexible and do not take into account the type of work requests when routing the received work requests to the agents of the contact center.
There is thus a need for a system and method to provide an automated mechanism to guarantee most optimal agent allocation, even when a less optimal resource has to be selected initially.